Super Mario 3D World announced for Wii U, coming this December

Nintendo may be sitting out this year's E3, but that doesn't mean the company doesn't have some games to show. On this morning's Nintendo Direct presentation, company head Satoru Iwata announced what most Wii U owners have been clamouring for: a new entry in the Mario series. The new title, Super Mario 3D World, reunites Mario and Luigi with Princess Peach and Toad (a la Super Mario Bros. 2) for a full, open world multiplayer experience. And much like the unique attributes they had in that second series installment, each character once again brings players special abilities, like Toad's fast run, Luigi's high jumps, Princess Peach's floating jumps and the all-around average Mario. According to Iwata-san,Super Mario 3D World is slated for a December release and will be available on the eShop, as well as in traditional brick-and-mortar shops. But knowing Nintendo's predilection for perfection, it's entirely possible that date could slip into early 2014.

AMD wins race to 5GHz CPU clock speed, in which it was the sole participant

AMD has refreshed its lineup of eight-core FX chips in what sounds like some straightforward overclocking of last year's products. The FX-9590 claims a clock speed of 5GHz in turbo mode, making it the "world's first commercially available 5GHz CPU processor," while the FX-9370 lags slightly behind at 4.7GHz, as compared to the 4.2GHz top speed of the current FX-8350. Both new CPUs are based on the familiar Piledriver core, which has a reputation for being relatively cheap and easily overclockable (honestly, the 5GHz barrier was obliterated long ago), but far behind an Intel Core i5 in terms of all-around computing. This is especially true since the launch of Haswell, which largely avoided clock speed increases in favor of architectural tweaks that didn't compromise efficiency. Maingear plans to pick up the 5GHz part for use in a gaming system coming this summer, but there's no word yet on pricing or even general availability for DIY upgraders. Now, we're just speculating, but with AMD increasingly focused on APUs, it's possible that today's chips will represent the FX's lap of glory.

Watch Nintendo's E3 2013 presentation here!

Nintendo's making its E3 announcements digitally this year, so if you're looking to hear more on the Wii U, 3DS and all those presumably incoming games, we'd advise you gaze into the embedded video stream right after the break. We'll be reporting all the notable news as it develops and it all kicks off in a few minutes!

Paranoid Android's HALO does Chat Heads-inspired multitasking, goes open source Mobile

It's been a couple months since we first saw the fruits of team Paranoid Android's labor around in-app pop-up window multitasking, and it looks like Paul Henschel and co. are finally sharing the finished product. HALO, as it's called, loosely combines the ideas behind Samsung's Multi Window and FaceBook's Chat Headsinto a slick multitasking interface. The feature is activated from the notification tray. It places an icon -- or halo -- on the display, which can be moved around very much like Chat Heads, or dismissed by double-tapping and dragging it towards the red X at the top. Swiping sideways from the halo shows a series of white lines and text bubbles that match and highlight the notifications in the status bar. Releasing your finger is like tapping on the selected notification, but instead of launching full-screen, the app opens in a pop-up window on top of whatever's already running, just like Multi Window. The background app continues to run while you interact with the foreground app -- to dismiss the pop-up window, simply tap outside of it. Other cool functionality includes swiping up to dismiss the last notification and the ability to pin apps permanently to the halo. But what's really most exciting is that team Paranoid Android's decided to make HALO open source so anyone can be involved. Check out the awesome demo video after the break.